The company is expanding its work force, not just for Ingrezza, but to bolster its productive research and development unit, said Kevin Gorman, Neurocrine’s CEO.

Gorman said the company is hiring a field sales force to market Ingrezza, which is approved for tardive dyskinesia. And other hires are planned in connection with the launch.

“We’ll have approximately 140 reps in the field, two zone managers that take care of eastern and western United States, and a national sales director,” Gorman said.

The sales reps, who are now being trained, should be in the field within two to three weeks.

Neurocrine started 2016 with about 115 people, nearly all in San Diego. This year, Neurocrine started with about 220 people, about 200 of them in San Diego.

“We have plans to increase the onsite staff here at Neurocrine by about 30-35 more people in the remaining eight months of this year,” Gorman said.

Some of those people will be IT and human resources people to support the increased payroll, he said.

“We’re also continuing to hire and bolster our internal R&D,” he said. “This drug, Ingrezza, and also our drug for women’s health, elagolix, that we have with our partner AbbVie, as well as the other drugs that we have in our pipeline — they’ve all been discovered and developed at Neurocrine.

“That’s been a very productive research engine, going after very difficult to drug targets in difficult diseases, so we continue to invest in there,” Gorman said. “So we’ll be hiring more chemists, we’ll be hiring more biologists, we’re hiring more clinical researchers.”

In February, Neurocrine announced another corporate partnership, with Portuguese drug maker Bial, to in-license a Parkinson’s drug, opicapone, sold in Europe under the name Ongentys.

Bial’s drug was approved in Europe last year to be used by adult Parkinson’s patients taking combination levodopa/ DOPA decarboxylaseinhibitors, whose movement fluctuations can’t be controlled with that combination.

“And now we’re collaborating with them to develop it and get it registered in the United States, and Neurocrine would be the company that would be selling it,” Gorman said. “That’s going to require additional staffing as we go through the year.”

That staffing will be in addition to those to be hired for the Ingrezza launch, Gorman said.

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Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

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Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

Genetic analysis conducted on one Neanderthal woman who lived 52,000 years ago was published Oct. 5 in a report in the journal Science. (October 6, 2017)

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a crackdown on clinics hawking stem cell treatments for a range of ailments. (September 1, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

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Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)

Researchers used eggs from healthy females and the sperm of a man who carried a gene mutation that causes inherited hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Aug. 3, 2017) (Sign up for our free video newsletter here http://bit.ly/2n6VKPR)